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[Telgin]

Easily possible.  Considering that pirates aren't going to work the same anymore, it could be an intended replacement for them spawning in Swiss cheese or spaghetti empires more frequently.

[Criptfeind]

I'm like 90% sure that the intra trade routes is merely to counter the spaghetti strategy people have stated is the best way to play.

It'll stop disconnected empires, which I used to do in expansive enough games where even a single line of systems between planets drained research too much (at least until you can research gateways... Interesting thing about this, once you get gateways you can build them above your planets and you'll only need a single trade station, in theory from what I understand.) but for the most part I don't think it'd change the idea of having long strung out or very Swiss cheesy empires being the best, in fact since they are replacing pirates (the previous punishment for making such empires) with the trade system I'm pretty sure this'll actually make long stringy empires that ignore vast swaths of space even more attractive.

They've said they are probably replacing the old pirate punishment for strung out empires with something else, but haven't settled on what that'd be.

Personally I feel like they should either accept stringy empires and stop trying to punish people for making them, or actually remove the punishments for NOT having a stringy empire. It kinda sucks that they are like "We gota punish people for having large empires" and when people respond with having smaller empires they respond with "we gota punish people for having small empires"

[Madman198237]

The irony of course being that if they just reduced the penalties to *literally everything* for having many empty or nearly-empty star systems (which makes basically zero sense anyway), they'd stop seeing cheesy (like, literally and in the comedic sense) empires and similar stuff.

[Broseph Stalin]

These changes seem to be about correcting player's behavior but what are players actually supposed to do? It seems like there's a lot of pushing and pulling but it's not going anywhere rational. Is the intended playstyle a handful of systems in a corner of the galaxy?

[forsaken1111]

Aside from the influence cost for claiming the empty systems, what other penalties exist for having them? I thought basic outposts no longer had an upkeep cost, so there is no reason to leave systems unclaimed unless you literally don't have the influence to claim them yet.

[Criptfeind]

Unless somethings changed since the last patch I played a long enough game in, systems give a penalty to research and unity costs. This is a relatively small penalty, so you won't notice it that much at the start of the game and it's worth expanding for a bit, but in my typical experience by mid to late game I've found I can double or triple my research speeds solely by deleting most of my outposts. Once planets go from producing dozens of resources with a few pops on low level buildings to hundreds of resources with maxed pops on high level buildings the couple of resources per system from orbitals becomes absolutely not worthwhile and you are much much much better off deleting almost all your systems and eating the piracy.

They are going to rejigger the numbers and stuff with the new empire size mechanic, but I kinda doubt it'll change the dynamic from what they've been saying.

[forsaken1111]

Ah, I was talking about the upcoming 2.2 patch. Systems no longer contribute to research/unity penalties. Only the total number of districts do, I believe, so it won't matter what your map footprint is, only how many districts you have constructed on worlds. This is a stealthy boost to habitats too, since habitat districts will be more efficient than dirtside planetary districts providing more jobs/output per district.

[Telgin]

Unless they changed something again, the number of owned systems does still contribute to the "empire size" mechanic they were using for research and unity penalties.  It's probably going to remain very small compared to districts, similar to how it works now, but they are keeping the mechanic.

These changes seem to be about correcting player's behavior but what are players actually supposed to do? It seems like there's a lot of pushing and pulling but it's not going anywhere rational. Is the intended playstyle a handful of systems in a corner of the galaxy?

Essentially... yes, I think so.  If you play on the default galaxy generation settings, each empire is usually relatively small since they're pretty crowded.  I'm guessing that empire size is more or less what the devs want players to play with.

It's pretty clear that the devs are trying to address snowballing through at least three mechanics here (influence, tech penalties and pirates), but you could probably make an argument that snowballing is half of the point of playing a game like Stellaris.

[Criptfeind]

I feel like for sure they've said that empire size is going to be some function of districts AND systems, but I can't find it, maybe it was on the steam or something, but I don't have time to watch. I might just be totally misremembering though. They could make systems worth holding into with the changes and tweeking numbers, but if I'm not wrong about empire size including systems the fundamentals are still in place to make systems not worth it.

Pretty much ninja'd by Telgin. It might remain small compared to districts, but planets are getting bigger (in some ways, smaller in others) as well, so the relative benefit of systems (and thus the decision on if they are even worth having) is going to go down as well.

It's pretty clear that the devs are trying to address snowballing through at least three mechanics here (influence, tech penalties and pirates), but you could probably make an argument that snowballing is half of the point of playing a game like Stellaris.

Ultimately I'm fine with anti snowball mechanics so long as they do well and the game is still fun. The issue with the tech penalties from systems is it ultimately fails to achieve it's goal as an antisnowball mechanic, you still want to snowball as hard as possible and have as many planets as possible. It just makes it so you don't want to own the space in between the planets as you snowball though the galaxy.

Similarly I dislike the pirate mechanic because it both really doesn't matter that much and is only an annoyance and not a fun mechanic, and also it's main purpose seems to be a weak patch job on the failed mechanic of system tech penalties. To punish people for playing in the way the game works instead of actually trying to change the systems so that it's not massively less efficient to play the way the devs want you to.

[Karnewarrior]

It's all punish punish punish seems to be the problem, and no reward. All negative results from playing wrong, but no positive results from playing right except for not being punished.

That's just not good design.

[Loud Whispers]

It's pretty hard to NOT minmax on higher difficulties with all the mechanics in place. I find it increasingly difficult to use suboptimal and retarded strategies or useless species without getting hopelessly drowned in pirates or AI, or else minmaxing and hopelessly snowballing to the point where the AI can't compete. Especially with the way the new difficulty scaling makes the AI more productive AND more powerful per ship AND outnumbering ships makes the AI shoot even faster, if you're not abusing diplomacy and rushing for megastructures and 25 tile research worlds with optimised pops you're not increasing in power fast enough to compete with the AI. Which is a shame because I usually enjoy doing silly things like isolationist purifiers or roach pop engineers or useless cat federators, and I find myself either overwhelmed or overwhelming with little leeway in between the extremes.

[Cruxador]

It's all punish punish punish seems to be the problem, and no reward. All negative results from playing wrong, but no positive results from playing right except for not being punished.

That's just not good design.

When it's just numeric differences, those are the same thing. You're rewarded for deleting superfluous stations, for example, with increased tech progress.

[Dunamisdeos]

We don't want to reduce the game to a series of blobs, so here's a penalty for not building a blob.

[Telgin]

It's pretty hard to NOT minmax on higher difficulties with all the mechanics in place. I find it increasingly difficult to use suboptimal and retarded strategies or useless species without getting hopelessly drowned in pirates or AI, or else minmaxing and hopelessly snowballing to the point where the AI can't compete. Especially with the way the new difficulty scaling makes the AI more productive AND more powerful per ship AND outnumbering ships makes the AI shoot even faster, if you're not abusing diplomacy and rushing for megastructures and 25 tile research worlds with optimised pops you're not increasing in power fast enough to compete with the AI. Which is a shame because I usually enjoy doing silly things like isolationist purifiers or roach pop engineers or useless cat federators, and I find myself either overwhelmed or overwhelming with little leeway in between the extremes.

What difficulty do you normally play on?  I can imagine it's like that in Admiral, or whatever the highest difficulty is, but it's not that bad on lower difficulties.  I think the AI only gets production and maybe naval capacity bonuses on higher difficulties now, but that does translate to bigger navies.

Or maybe I'm just minmaxing without realizing it, since I usually do end up way ahead of every AI.  I do enjoy megastructures and optimize my research as much as I can without doing things like deleting all of my nonplanet systems.  But then I try to take RP focused traits, like Weak, and civics, like Life-Seeded, which are both objectively pretty bad.

[ChairmanPoo]

It's all punish punish punish seems to be the problem, and no reward. All negative results from playing wrong, but no positive results from playing right except for not being punished.

That's just not good design.

It puts the lotion on it's skin or we'll use the hose